Handcrafted Lighting with a Quick Ship Option
Opening a new restaurant is a monumental undertaking where an enticing menu is only the start. A successful venue also offers a creative and engaging atmosphere that attracts consumers, makes them feel comfortable, and keeps them coming back for more.
The owners of Uno Mas Tacos & Tequila in Oxford, Mississippi, left the design of their new restaurant in the very capable hands of Mary Sanders Ferriss, the creative mind behind Ferriss & Company. Building on the owner’s wish to serve traditional cuisine from his home country, Mary Sanders developed a space that caters to an increasingly sophisticated, well-traveled diner.
“Our goal was to create tension in a contemporary space using classic elements of Mexican culture,” she explains. “This includes the Mexican blanket, blown glass drinkware, and hand-drawn menus with illustrations of indigenous plants and animals. In the end, we told the story of authentic Mexican food and drink with a youthful twist.”
When selecting lighting for the new space, Mary Sanders not only needed a high-quality product that offered the appropriate scale, style, and price point, but was also readily available to meet her timeline for construction.
As an interior designer working in both commercial and retail environments, she knew where to turn to check all the boxes for lighting. As a long-time Barn Light Electric customer, Mary found easy-to-customize, handcrafted barn lights readily available in our Quick Ship Collection.
“Within the context of the project’s other finishes and furnishings, barn-style lighting helped us hit the industrial note that we were seeking to balance against other more youthful, urban-transitional motifs,” she notes.
Mary Sanders chose the Wilcox Deep Bowl Pendant Light to highlight the new space. She customized these hand-spun pendant lights with 12″ shades, White finish, White cord, and White wire cages.
“We really like the shape and size of this light,” she says. “The deep bowl provides a nice profile that gives a bit of style to a simple industrial design.” These Quick Ship fixtures are constructed from the same commercial-grade materials as Barn Light’s regular fixtures but, with more limited options, can ship in just a few business days.
“Since this was a repetitive element in the space, I needed something that was large enough to ground the ceiling plane but also not too large to become a huge design feature,” Mary Sanders explains. “We chose the White finish so that it would blend into the exposed ceiling but, with the cage, it doesn’t disappear completely.” While her original order was not a rush, a subsequent change in the grid meant more lights were needed and having the Quick Ship option came in handy for the design team.
“These lights ended up being the perfect style to complement the architecture of the building,” she notes, “but still stylish enough to speak to the design aesthetic of the brand.”
Photos courtesy of Ferriss & Company and Andrew Welch Photography
